Please help me stop e-mail address harvesting

Hi Guys

I do hope someone can help me...
I manage a tourism website that has 1400 advertisers. All the advertisers contact details including their e-mail addresses are displayed on their Ad. Just recently we have had a large than usual number of spammers (and some presumably legit companies) obviously use an e-mail address harvester (or whatever they are called) run through our site, pick up all the e-mail addresses and then they send their spam mail out to our advertisers soliciting business. We know this because we have an e-mail address that is in a 'test type ad' which is only used for just this purpose - to see who / what spam is sent. We change that address regularly so we know when a new 'harvester' has done the rounds.

How can I stop this without removing the clients e-mail addresses?

(Guest House owners are a strange bunch, mostly not very net-savvy and although they have proper booking forms on the ads/pages, they still want their e-mail addresses displayed).

I have a .robots.txt with all sorts of exclusions but heard that it was quite a severe exclusion list. Would someone have a look at it for me and perhaps give me some advice?

Any help would be very much appreciated.
Thanks
Candy

 

enkode them:
Enkoder

Once you know the replacements for the alphabet & numbers, you can do it on the fly.

 

What, you mean they don't (shocked look)

(sheepish grin really)

 

Hi Candy,

Have a look at my website, and one of our clients enquiry form, you'll see it takes the email address from a database, rather than displaying it in the HTML. Have a look at downloading formmail.php from hotscripts.com it's not database driven, but it might help you sort the spamming problem.

I had the same problem until I changed to a PHP script.

Let me know if you need any further information.

 

Thanks for all the advice.
The problem with the enkoder is that the e-mail address has to have a subject and bcc address and I haven''t been able to figure out how to get that working using an enkoder.
my e-mail addresses look similar to this:
mailto:sample@domain.com?subject='The subject in here'&bcc=anothername@domain.com

I guess I just have to live with this constant spam ?

 

Just encode the address, leave everything else as it is.

 

it would look something like this:

mailto:sample@domain.com?subject='The subject in here'&bcc=anothername@domain.com

Code (markup):

mailto:sample@domain.com?subject='The subject in here'&bcc=anothername@domain.com

 

Hmm, that didn't show as the encoded characters. However, if you view the source of this page and search for "code:" then look at the content directly below, you'll see how it looks to harvesters. They can't read it. This is actually the encoder I meant to link to: url encoder

 

Hi there

Thanks so much for responding, I had a look at your site and see from all your 'warnings' that you clearly had a bad run with the same problem. Thank you VERY much for the advice, I will take a look at that form and see if I can get it to work.

I think clients will just have to decide - if they want their addys displayed they must deal with the spam, if not, we can do that for them. They all do have booking forms (quite similar to yours) so it should not be tooo much work to set up.

Thanks again
Candy

 

hi mocpacfan

I've tried that, it simply doesn't work (or I'm too blonde to get it to work). It displays what should be in the HTML on the page, which we don't want, it looks tacky. Maybe I'm just too dumb for this...

 

If you can use a php script, there is no reaon why you cannot modify it to include whatever headers you want in the email, so bcc shouldn't pose a problem. I'm sure you'll get all the help you need in modifying such a script if you want it.

 

Blonde? Looks like brunette to me

I'm not sure I understand. You don't want to see the email address, just a mail to link? You can still use the encoding in the mailto: tag around a text link.

 

Candy, you could say that.. I can relate to the problems you are having, it's easier for these morons to "steal" clients off another site then to actually do the research themselves.

We now trace the IP address of anyone using the enquiry form, and have hidden the email address so harvesters can't mess with us.

The script I currently use is different because it holds all of the data in a mysql database, but the old script I used to use is a more secure version of formmail.php, if you PM your email address I'll send you the script, and have a play around with it, to see ifyou can get it working on your site.

The encoding is another way of getting around the problem.. it's something I thought about initially.. can these harvesters get through javascript links? If not, another idea is to have a popup window with the email address in it, within the javascript code.

Also have a look at www.hotscripts.com this is where I got the original script from.

Darren

 

And just to add to the melee, here's a simple one to have a look at http://www.stevedawson.com/emailencode.php

 

Adn just to add to the confusion heres one in Javascript:

<script language=javascript>
<!--
var contact = "link message"

var email = "name"

var emailHost = "URL"

document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + email + "@" + emailHost+ ">" + contact + "</a>")

//-->

</script>

This can be modified to add the subject etc as required